The Museum With No Name

I visited the Musée du Quai Branly yesterday, and found it an interesting place. It’s one of Paris’ newest museums, and it’s devoted to the art and culture of the non-Western world. Exhibits cover areas in Oceania, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. I think it wants to be a global museum for a global age.

But the name of the museum speaks to the problem with the collection: it’s not named after its contents, but rather after the street where it’s located. It would be like calling a museum in the US the “Main Street Museum” or the “Poplar Avenue Museum.” The name tells you nothing about what’s inside, only where to find it.

The issue, I think, is the fact that the French have these artifacts from the rest of the world because they colonized all of these places in the nineteenth century. Now that European colonialism is a defunct institution and historians have revealed it as the exploitative and brutal practice that it was, France is faced with a tough question. How to display the items that they took from other parts of the world, sometimes by force, when they ruled these peoples? What do you call a museum that is comprised of the spoils of war and slavery when you’re trying to put a positive spin on it?

So they call it the Musée du Quai Branly because it sits on the Quai Branly near the Eiffel Tower (you can see it in the background of my picture). It’s a beautiful, modern glass and metal structure with a park outside and plants actually growing out of the facade. It wraps you in nature when you enter. Maybe that helps to take the edge off of the story contained -- but not really told -- inside the building.